Linkedin and your Jobsearch

The Staffing View

On business, the workplace and employee relations

_August, 2010

Sharpen Your LinkedIn Profile for Your Job Search

Would you ever send your impressive resume to a prospective employer accompanied by a bland and uninspiring cover letter? Of course not It’s the first opportunity you have to connect with the hiring manager once they click on your email or slice open your envelope Bore them at the beginning and they may pass on finding out what you really have to offer

If you’re online these days, in a social networking site such as LinkedIn, hiring managers may be looking you over before you’re aware they even have an opening When they click on your LinkedIn profile, what are they finding? Your profile acts a hybrid cover letter/resume on LinkedIn It also does the same for the more than 70 million other users of the site Fortunately not all of them are competing with you for a job But depending on your specialty and your field, you can assume there are hundreds to thousands of rivals for hiring managers to look over How can you stand out?

Promote your specialty Football coaches love players who can “do it all” Run Block Tackle But LinkedIn allows hiring managers to find specialists when they need them Rather than be inundated by resumes from generalists who answer job ads, they can search on specific terms and more efficiently uncover candidates Identify your strengths and flag yourself as a specialist

What will you do for them? Sure, it’s important that people know where you’ve worked and what you’ve done It establishes a baseline for employers to investigate you further But then they want to know what you can do for them in the future Be a trouble shooter If you can imagine the companies you’d like to work for you can imagine their business challenges Use the “Summary” window to state your ability to solve problems

Back it up LinkedIn has applications such as Wordpress and SlideShare Presentations that can be used to share your knowledge Using SlideShare you can create PowerPoint presentation of yourself or a specific topic Do you write a blog? That’s another great way to show hiring managers that you have ideas about your work Use the Wordpress application to sync your blog posts to your LinkedIn page

Who’ll vouch for you? Your LinkedIn profile allows you to include recommendations from former employers, colleagues or clients Recommendations can enhance your image as a problem solver by having people praise specific work you’ve done Needless to say, titles are impressive But a recommendation from field manager that explains what you did and the benefits it produced can have just as much impact Don’t ignore this feature

 

Reinventing Your Career

The discouraging reality for many people in a job search is that the jobs they once had no longer exist Industries such as automobiles, banking and newspapers have shed millions of employees and those positions aren’t coming back

That leaves many unemployed workers looking for a next step Should they go back to school for another degree? Should they consider retraining for another occupation? Should they move to another part of the country or even out of the country entirely? Unless those people can find another way to make a living in their shrinking sectors, they face a career change For some people the switch will be painless, for others, very difficult

Pamela Mitchell, author of The 10 Laws of Career Reinvention, offers four tips on how to get on with “reinventing” your career

Be Flexible Perhaps you’ve designed a plan to change careers Be willing to alter that strategy as situations present themselves You may need to change your tactics and even your goal “Sticking to one plan – especially when you can it’s not working – defeats the whole purpose of reinvention,” says Mitchell

Be honest with yourself If you’re reinventing your career, don’t let your new career include what you don’t like or just aren’t good at Evaluate what you consider to be your strengths Are they really such or something you want to believe are strengths? Have the courage to walk away from the old and towards the new

Be willing to live outside your comfort zone Moving into a new career means enduring a certain level of discomfort Yet “the more you practice tolerating it, the easier it gets,” says Mitchell As you reinvent yourself, make new things familiar to get comfortable outside your comfort zone

Be okay with your dream Many people sabotage their own reinvention by feeling as though they need permission to chase their dream Mitchell says to “give yourself permission” to pursue what you want “Although you might think this happens automatically, the minute you start envisioning a new lifestyle, your subconscious will start throwing up a whole host of roadblocks”

Small Business and New England’s Economic Recovery

There aren’t enough small businesses in New England to give the region a competitive edge compared to the rest of the country But when looking for a comeback of the New England economy, small employers will still play a major role In all six states, companies that employ fewer than 100 people make up the majority of firms, according to the New England Economic Project, a regional consulting group The average number of companies with less than 100 employees is slightly above 40 percent That compares with firms that employ between 100 and 500 workers and make up less than 25 percent of companies, and those that employ more than 500 and less than 1,000 who constitute less than 5 percent of employers

All of that means people in a job search will be looking to those small businesses to lead the charge The good news is that small businesses were doing the job prior to the recession, according to NEEP In particular, firms with less than 50 employees grew the fastest during most of the 2000 decade Those small employers weren’t immune to the downturn, but they shed fewer jobs than most firms with payrolls in the hundreds

Small employers are often cited as the backbone of the economy – regionally and nationally Experts point to their ability to quickly respond to business trends and act on opportunities vs large corporations with their layers of bureaucracy That may be true, but small employers tend to pay lower wages as well In New England, the average annual wage paid to workers in companies with more than 1,000 employees is almost two times as high as the average wages paid to employees in firms with fewer than 10 workers

Still, considering that employment growth in New England is expected to range from one to two percent per year beginning in 2011 through 2014, according to the economists at NEEP, however many jobs small businesses add will help recover the more than 350,000 that were lost among the six states from 2007 to 2009 As they try, it won’t be easy All of the New England states, for example, rank in the bottom half of the Small Business Survival Index ranking of 50 states, produced by the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council http://wwwsbecouncilorg/survivalindex2009/ The Survival Index includes more than 30 different state-government imposed or government-related costs that impact small businesses

At Microtech Staffing Group, we stayed connected to small and large employers and the expanding pool of qualified workers throughout the recession That communication enables us to match the staffing needs of our clients with professionals who have the most compatible skill sets

US Government Approved

More than 200,000 veterans are expected to return back to the US workforce each year as the military begins a systematic draw-down of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan For employers they represent an attractive labor pool because of their proven experience, desirable skills and educational foundation Companies that need talent in engineering, operations, finance, accounting, transportation, security, IT, facilities and medical specialties can find that among those who have served in the military

In the military workers handle accounting, communications, food services, computer tech support and physical plant maintenance while also working with budget constraints So veterans have valuable baseline skills that can be applied to a variety of employment positions

As for education, 90 percent of enlisted members hold a high school diploma or GED, and more than 85 percent of officers have at least a bachelor’s degree Their service saves HR managers time in the hiring process, as they’ve already undergone a vetting process through background checks and drug testing to enter and remain in the military Many have undergone security clearance screening

The US Department of Labor offers 10 reasons for employers to hire veterans Would someone with these qualities fit at your firm?

• Leadership skills


• Teamwork


• Integrity


• Respect for procedures


• A global perspective on technical trends


• Health and safety standards


• Efficient performance under pressure


• An accelerated learning curve


• The endurance to triumph over adversity


• An ability to work in a diverse environment